Thursday, October 27, 2016

After 5 months of development, GMMP 2.1 is finally here. This release was mainly a stop gap between 2.0 and 3.0 which will have an entirely new UI. There have been some long awaited features that I felt needed to be added before dropping support for some older versions of android. 2.1 drops support for jelly bean and 3.0 will drop the support for kit kat. However 3.0 is a long ways away and will truly benefit all the 5.0+ users since google added some great UI apis in android 5 (like the animation api).

The new update will be rolled out to 20% of the users today and I will increase that to either 50% or 100% depending on whether issues pop up.

Some of the bigger newer features are as follows:

Share Option

The ability to share what you are playing with others in text form and file form have been asked for by tons of users and gmmp 2.1 finally adds that option.

Selecting Now Playing Info will let you share the name of the current artist and song you are playing in text form. Selecting file will send the file to whatever app you select.

New Higher Quality Album Art Source

GMMP will now give you the option of higher resolution album art than what was previously offered. The auto download will still choose the original source first (so lower end devices arent auto downloading 1600x1200 images), however the album art selection UI will show the highest quality image first assuming there is a match.

Higher quality source

Original source

Google Now Integration

Voice commands and text searches will now allow you to play music in GMMP.

Commands:

Play [Artist]

Play [Album] by [Artist]

Play [Song] by [Artist]

Keep in mind that Google Now is in charge of translating the voice into a search command into GMMP, so it will only work if google now finds something on the device. By default it will also search play music streams. So it might be beneficial to turn off play music as one of the searching options in google now

Saving Ratings to File

The last big new ability in GMMP 2.1 is the ability to save ratings to the tags of the audio file. This happens by default when you rate your music. For those with tons of music already rated, you can use the "backup stats" option in the settings and it will not only save the stats to the stats.dat file, but will also save any ratings in the gmmp db into the tags of the audio file

Full Changelog:

2.1.0 (10/27/2016)

New:

-Added google now voice command support for playing artist, album, or song

-Added new higher quality album art download source

-Added share option (now playing info or file)

-Added ability to save ratings in tags

-Backup stats will now save ratings in the tags if they are not already set

Friday, October 7, 2016

After all this time of getting reports of GMMP not showing up as a "default music player" I was able to fully understand what the issue is. It wasnt until recently that someone specifically mentioned google now + default player (the first part was always left out, so i made the assumption it was the default player when opening files), so I started playing around with google now's "play X" voice commands. GMMP did not show up there and after a little research into the voice commands, I decided it would be worth the extra day or 2 to add that in before closing out the 2.1 beta.

So now you should be able to select GMMP when doing voice commands like "Play Artist" or "Play Song By Artist" or "Play Album By Artist"

2.1.0 Beta 6 (10/07/2016)
-Fixed issue where sdcard write access is not saved when using 'save to playlist'
-Fixed crash when saving new playlist
-Force left align for text from tags stored in a RTL language
-Backup stats will now save ratings in the tags if they are not already set
-The trial expired / invalid unlocker message pop up will now launch straight to the unlocker in google play / amazon when okay is selected
-Improved parsing of synchronized lyrics
-Added google now voice command support for playing artist, album, or song
-Fixed crash during song transition
-Reset trial
-Updated translations

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

GMMP 2.1 is mostly done besides remaining bug fixes and maybe one additional capability, so I anticipate Beta 6 to be mostly a fix update with a full release shortly after. On another note I've already started prototyping some things for 3.0. I am working on a new theme engine that should allow theme transitions without having to restart the UI and support any arbitrary color combination for material themes. My hope this should play nicely with a cool feature google added in 5.0 to extract colors from images (album art) to use for themes. https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/extracting-colors-to-a-palette-with-android-lollipop/

2.1.0 Beta 5 (09/28/2016)
-Added toast when toggling repeat via now playing menu
-Updated support library to 24.2.1
-Updated play services to 9.6.0
-Added option to disable scans when Android Media Library Updates (Prefs -> Scanner -> Setup Auto Scan -> Sync With Android Media Library)
-Added option to set write permissions straight from the settings (Prefs -> General -> Device Prefs -> Enable Write Permissions)
-Fixed issue with the audioengine not loading on some samsung devices running 4.4 due to samsung not implementing an official api
-Reduced default buffer size on 5.0+
-Defaulted stop on full audio focus loss to true
-Added logic to fix poorly constructed playlists so they will load faster
-Adjusted saved value for id3 rating tag to match what MusicBee writes
-Changed default menu actions for now playing (all but toggle fullscreen, jump to playing menu, and toggle split view are now enabled by default)
-Updated translations

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

For those of you not aware, there are some newer updates available in the gmmp beta on google play

http://gonemadmusicplayer.proboards.com/thread/266/beta-tester

A lot of the google apis have been updated so if you having issues with chromecast or other google related features its worth checking out. The beta also implements android's MediaSession api which should allow for better integration with media controls and selecting gmmp as a music player.

Friday, May 13, 2016

GMMP has been around for 5 years now and a large portion of the codebase was written back in the android 1.x - 2.x days when the android apis were not very mature and there was no compatibility library. I've done my best to update the code as new versions of android, but alas moving forward is going to be quite difficult with the current codebase / design. Fortunately gmmp's audioengine and data layer are pretty solid so they dont need much rework. So what I would like to do is do a large refactor / cleanup of most of gmmp's backend code (like intent receivers) and more importantly start working on a new UI from scratch. GMMP's current UI is really just a reskinned version of the original UI i wrote years ago and jamming more new features into that just isnt going to work very well. A new UI will allow me to design something that works well for all of GMMP's existing features and can work for a lot of the future planned features. Plus with the support library I should be able to make something that looks much better.

I dont plan on removing the existing UI.. just making something new alongside it. I know some people love the holo style UI so i would not want to take that away from them.

2.0.27 Beta (04/27/2016)
-Fixed writing disc no tag in m4a files
-Long artist names in the playlist view will now only show on a single line
-Minor improvement in the responsiveness of handling remote/media control commands
-Added code to prevent playback from auto resuming immediately after auto pausing from a disconnect
-Fixed some crashes related to destroying activities
-Fixed some crashes in the audioengine when changing tracks
-Fixed other various crashes
-Added Slovak and Hungarian translations
-Updated other translations

Monday, March 21, 2016

The next GMMP is finally ready to get out of beta. Most of the time was spent working on allowing write access to music on the sdcard. You now should be able to edit tags of files on the sdcard and delete files. When you first try to do a write action on your sdcard, you will be prompted with a message with instructions. The standard android device select UI will then come up and you will have to select the root of your sdcard and select okay. This will grant GMMP access to write/edit any file in that selected location. The number of beta testers with sdcards is fairly small so I would not be too surprised if there was a minor bug here or there.

On another note, if you are looking for a way to obtain a free promo code for the unlocker, consider helping with translations:

2.0.21 Beta (01/07/2016)
-Fixed bug where gmmp would be unable to pick a random album
-Tweaked scrobbler intents to play nicer with FloatingLyrics
-Added album filtering. Prefs -> Library -> Album Library -> Album Filtering. You can filter the album view
and albums picked for album shuffle based on number of tracks and length of album
-Added more improvements to the scanner to prevent duplicates
-Added workaround to prevent MusiXmatch from incorrectly launching and being unable to back out of
-Fixed bug where widget would be invisible if no song was selected in now playing